Did you know that? Maybe not.
Most think writing is about having a good idea. It's not. There are a million ideas; very few are executed. Writing, like so many things, is about plugging away until you finish.
I'd forgotten about that myself.
Now, with so much time on my hands, I find myself writing again. Most of it is nothing much: rambling journal entries, thinking out loud in text, like talking to the walls. You wouldn't want to read it. Should I become famous and studied, pity the poor future scholar who has to read my crappy notes.
But here we are: a blog post on a new blog, another writing journey begun. In a private Google Docs file, the first notes of a memoir. Perhaps soon a few poems.
All this almost nothing took a couple hours of staring at the screen, nothing much on my mind. Lots of nothing. Word after word after word, perhaps for months, until some kind of something takes shape. Who has time for that bullshit!?
I do. Now. This slow, cheap, lazy life is set up that way on purpose.
What I'm speaking of is the hardest kind of creative writing, of course, the kind from the soul.
All writing takes more work than it seems, but some is easier than others. I've written many a press release, memo, and marketing blurb off the top of my head. The more restrictive the scope and familiar the material, the quicker it goes. You become efficient.
But the more original the work, the more searching and researching, revising, wandering, sputtering, and dead ends.
Basically, the writers you'd call Writers need a lot of time on their asses. "But-in-chair time" it's called. Unglamorous. No sane person would do it if they had a choice.
